Last week, a Barron's article argued that an expected increase in Treasury bond yields could lead investors to ditch dividend stocks for bonds. Yields on 10-year Treasury bonds were at 2.61% at 11:30 a.m. Monday morning, but Sam Stovall of S&P Capital IQ told Barron's that the research firm expects the yield to reach 2.9% by the end of the year and 3.3% by the end of 2015. And when that happens, Stovall continued, investors will replace dividend stocks, which currently popular as the investment with the highest return, with bonds as they did in May 2013 following the announcement of the Federal Reserve's intent to taper its bond buying program.
With this in mind, we ran a screen for investors intent on keeping dividend stocks on hand. We began with a group of stocks that are going ex-dividend this week. Next, we narrowed down that group to high dividend stocks with yields of 2% or greater: Axis Capital Holdings Limited (AXS), Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB), Fulton Financial Corporation (FULT), Great Southern Bancorp Inc. (GSBC), Home Loan Servicing Solutions, Ltd. (HLSS), Independent Bank Corp. (INDB), Maiden Holdings, Ltd. (MHLD), U.S. Bancorp (USB) and Xerox Corp. (XRX).